In the real time flow of the flower calendar, the magnolia has probably finished and the cherry blossoms are in full bloom by now, but the world of this blog is still in progress with a time lag of less than three weeks, and the season is still early spring with some chilly days.
Speaking of early spring flowers, while allspice, apricot, and peach are all fine, how about rape blossoms? The Hamarikyu Gardens, located in the heart of Tokyo, offers a magnificent field of rape blossoms to enjoy to the fullest. I wanted to try out some new photo gears, I went out there with my S5.
The sky was bright and cloudy, perfect for photographing flowers. The temperature was cool and the amount of pollen, source of allergies in the air was low. The field of rape blossoms was in full bloom and anyone could take beautiful pictures with anything,
The inclusion of the Shiodome high rise buildings in the background is a Hamarikyu flavor.
However, if the blooms are this spectacular, you may want to take another shot with a brighter lens. In anticipation of this, I brought along the smc PENTAX-FA77mm limited. I’m in awe of this lens, which I secretly call the “bokeh queen” of the K-mount, and when I attached it to the S5 via an adapter for the L-mount…
As you can see, it’s a bit different, and this is such a nice result. I think I took the photo at the top with the lens open (I vaguely remember this because it was not recorded).
Lenses that produce such beautiful background bokeh tend to have unnaturally hard front bokeh, but the FA77mm limited defies this common belief, and the front bokeh is quite soft and beautiful.
Let’s stop it down a little. Naturally, the softness is reduced, but the expression is still quite pleasing.
There is a loss of light on the periphery, but this is not what I was aiming for. I don’t know the cause, but I don’t think this symptom would occur with the bare FA77mm when stopped down, so using the mount adapter may have had some effect…
I only have one L-mount lens, a standard zoom, and I can’t increase the number of lenses so easily because I ran out of money to buy a body. I have to make use of my existing K-mount lenses for the time being, so I got this mount adapter and tried it out.
I was able to physically attach both the body side and the lens side without any looseness. Incidentally, it looks like this when set up.
The small single-focal length lens is good for sharp surfaces, isn’t it?
The top of the adapter is slightly visible, but there is a movable part less than a few centimeters long that serves as a simple aperture ring mechanism. This is convenient because it allows you to manually stop down the aperture when a digital-only lens without an aperture ring is attached, but you need to be a little careful when operating this aperture ring.
The following is a summary of the results of testing with a number of lenses attached, based on visual inspection of the lens I used.
-In the case of DA lenses without an aperture ring, it is usually not possible to control the aperture on the lens side, but with this adapter, it is possible to manually open and close the aperture from maximum aperture to maximum aperture in intervals of 4 to 5 steps.
-For older lenses with an aperture ring (such as the FA77mm), the aperture can be controlled by the lens aperture ring, but if the aperture ring is set to “A”, the aperture can be controlled by the adapter ring in the same way as above.
-In some cases, the direct operation of the aperture ring on the lens and the ring operation of the adapter are doubly intertwined. For example, I have actually experienced a situation where, after setting f/8 with the aperture ring, I touched the adapter ring and the aperture opened and closed in an unintended way, resulting in an incorrect exposure.
When using a lens with an aperture ring, you must be careful not to accidentally touch the aperture ring of this adapter. You can fix it with tape if you want, .
But enough about the adapter, here is another photo of a field of rape blossoms.
At this time in the time line of the blog post, the plum blossoms were in full bloom at Hamarikyu. So, this time I took only yellow-colored photos, but next time I will change the color tone and show you the plum blossoms of Hamarikyu story.
